Recovery

by John Berryman

  ‘Christ, I told you,’ Severance said, giving up. ‘You’re as slippery as an eel. Listen, I hate to do this, but I may have to bring this up in Group. I don’t know, I’ll think about it.’

  ‘I’m not afraid of you, you bastard!’

  ‘Hutch, that’s a lie. Everybody is afraid of being confronted in Group, and you know it. Moreover, I’m a friend of yours, and you know that too.’

  ‘Then why are you making mountains out of nothing?’ Hutch sounded aggrieved now.

  ‘I don’t think it’s nothing. But I’m as sick as you are, so I don’t know, maybe you do just happen to be sloppy at home and neat here—’

  ‘It’s a lie,’ Hutch shouted. ‘Now will you get out of here?’

  Severance went. Sunk in thought he wandered toward the Snack Room. What the hell was wrong with Hutch? if anything was, or maybe it was just himself? Not bloody likely, he decided irritably. Hutch had not given him one straight answer. Confronted again and again, he had taken out his Defence Manual, well-thumbed and utterly familiar, and said, ‘Ah, page 67 will cover that,’ and when page 67 was rejected, ‘Ah, page 114,’ and so on. Screw him, they were right: he couldn’t level. Not wouldn’t—Alan saw that Hutch wasn’t to blame—couldn’t: the truth was not in him, on the topic of his room’s unnatural uninhabited state. Why not, then? What delusion hid it from him? The scientist turned into his room and sat down with a cigarette. He might be as deluded as Hutch, but Gene had seen through him. The truth lay somewhere around here, available, if he waited. He waited. He heard, ‘I’m here,‘ blasted at him, the defence total. Well, it was a lie. Hutch had not arrived. On the other hand it was true, in that Hutch was physically present in that deserted room. Ha! and Severance drew in smoke with light breaking. He was just exactly only physically present—going through the motions—he had not entered treatment—his position was Defiance, and, ‘I’ll take off the minute I don’t like it.’ That must be it—and wasn’t it precisely what Gene had seen in his ‘being unable to buy’ the First Step? that is to say, resistance: a self-con: I’m here, I’m taking it, but I’m not having any part of it either. Keg and Harley were on the nose: the two of them were brothers, not identical twins but twins in evasion. Only, with Gene’s penetration he had cleared up on this basic topic himself; his treatment was proceeding. He was a little less sick than Hutch. Without enthusiasm he saw that it was his job to hit Hutch in Group, just as he had wondered if it might be. Not nice. Hutch would read: Treachery—and unless he cleared up he would never forgive him. Severance uncrossed his legs and felt bad. They had been through Belsen last Spring together. He saw the unjust resentment call it rage coming. Well he would rather see Hutch sober than friendly and that was a fact. He hoped there was nothing noble about this sentiment. Flat minimal duty was the business. Ugh. ‘Cut, damn it, cut,’ he heard Vic’s senior telling him as the young surgeon stood paralyzed with the scalpel in his hand before his first incision. Okay. One good friend gone. But Group was utterly different from a dyad: unless it supported his confrontation, his suspicion was merely unjust (as so often)—maybe there was some explanation, after all, for what he saw as weirdness. Hutch’s behaviour would decide. Unhappily he stood up, jammed cigarettes and matches in his shirt pocket and left for the Snack Room, damning all doubt delusion duty and brotherhood. He had no choice.

  Charley in high spirits—due for his Fifth tomorrow —was entertaining Mike M, Big Bill and Jeree with his antics at home, midnight, after a grand night out. He stuck his elbows out, miming, broguing. There were two Eskimo Pies left in the freezer and Severance leaned against it munching one and chuckling. He was reminded of a droll tale from Howarden and after Charley had climaxed—‘you see? but then I passed out’—he told it. Jeree’s face was brighter than usual.

  ‘A sweet story, friends, and as true as Treatment. Drunk comes home at his regular hour, closing time, and can’t find the keyhole. Wife lets him in, embraces him tenderly, says, “Have a good time, dear?” instead of the usual, leads him to his favourite chair, pulls his boots off, asks, “Can I make you a drink?” He can’t believe it. She goes to the kitchen and brings back a triple, has one herself, sits at his feet, rubs his knees, cozy cozy, never seen anything like it, pretty soon he gets the message: “Shall we go up to bed, honey?” He thinks it over with his remaining brain-cells. Finally he says: “Well, I might as well. I’m gonna get hell for this when I get home anyway.” ’

  The afternoon wore away. Hutch was not at their table at dinner, across from him on the right, but two tables off. After dinner and a tiresome thrice-told lecture on—horrifying to him last Spring—the tiny upper lefthand corner (conscious mind) of the very large blackboard representing the vast Unconscious that says, in terms of learned behaviour and with irresistible authority, ‘I want alcohol’—with only the ittybitty Conscious to make the commitment that may arrest the disease—he groped for The Missing Years and read Basic Judaism with four eyes. Around eleven o’clock he came on this: ‘I cannot respect my fellow excessively. On the contrary, since he contains something of God, his moral worth is infinite.

  ‘Translated into concrete terms, this means that I may not use him as a mere tool for my purposes but must always treat him as an end in himself. I may not injure him in any fashion, oppress, exploit, humiliate him, or deprive him of anything to which he is entitled. Nor may I deceive him or withhold the truth from him’ (Severance was getting used to these ‘coincidences’ but he was startled) ‘since, as the rabbis pointed out long ago, oppression may be through words as well as deeds. Finally, I may not restrain or inhibit his self-fulfilment according to his talents, inclinations, and conscience’ depending on his degree of illness and delusion. Severance said his prayer and crawled onto the bed easier in mind.

  He was happy, though, to be taken off the hook when Keg began Group with Hutch: ‘What’s with you, Hutch?’ and getting an incredible, ‘Fine. Fine,’ from the closed, resentful face, entered on a fullscale confrontation. Severance was both relieved and pained to watch his old pal in business at the lemonade stand of yesterday: angry—and admitting it but minimizing, shifting, contradicting himself —only not attacking of course, not attacking—polite, smiling, managing, hurt, scared, so Alan read him. He said nothing whatever of their dyad and finally, during a painful silence Severance described it, eyes moving between Keg and Hutch.

  ‘Your room looked odd to me too, last week,’ said Keg. It was lovely to Alan to be confirmed. ‘What about it, Hutch? Alan’s confronted you.’

  ‘Sure! Sure!’ Hutch blustered indifference. ‘He expects everybody to live in a stye.’

  ‘But I saw just what he did—oddity.’

  ‘That was a week ago. I wasn’t settled in.’

  ‘He’s talking about yesterday.’

  ‘To hell with yesterday! We’re supposed to live just one day at a time, aren’t we? Well, I’m doing it.’

  ‘You are doing absolutely nothing of any kind whatever about anything. You’re on Cloud Nine, with your feet planted firmly in midair. I’ve never given anybody such a hard time before, and you “feel fine,” you see yourself as a “nice guy,” you’re “independent.” Bullshit.’

  Into the stillness that followed, Harley said quietly: ‘We’re all dependent people. Take our chemicals away, we have to find something else to depend on.’

  Nobody else said anything.

  Severance took a risk. ‘Hutch,’ he said in a neutral voice, ‘are you a son of a bitch?’

  ‘No,’ came with the baleful look Alan had once seen in the eyes of a mongoose in the grounds of the famous old British hotel outside Benares just before it attacked and killed a large green snake, while in the same breath

  ‘Me neither!’ Stack sang out from across the room. ‘I had a wonderful mother!’

  Roars of laughter except from Hutch and Keg—Severance couldn’t help himself, if Hutch was on Cloud Nine Stack hadn’t entered the solar system yet—but though Keg ignored the old boy, keeping onto Hutch, the
pressure was lost, and nothing happened. Group was a complete failure. Severance felt like Stonewall Jackson surviving his try. But more ran underground than over on Ward W, and two nights later—Thursday—he saw Hutch seating himself across in the usual place, half-smiling nervous, his face open, and leaning forward to say, ‘I can’t keep my damned room shipshape after all,’ and everything was forgotten between them as their treatment proceeded.

  16

  IT WAS AFTER TUESDAY MIDNIGHT, Week III of one of the lesser dynasties of the Middle Kingdom, when Severance, low in the mouth, wandering restlessly about his insufferable room, heard a knock and let Mike M in. He said only, ‘I wondered if you’d like to have this,’ pushing a sheet of paper out awkwardly, and went away. The scientist sat down with it. Maybe this was Help. He had received two important pieces of advice from Mike already: ‘If you pick up one piece a day, you’re in business,’ and, ‘Stop wondering and questioning. If it’s working for me, okay.’ Instead of reading the paper he thought about these. Neither had done him much good. He was picking up twenty ‘pieces’ a day and here he was in the Seventh Circle, worrying all. Envy, as he often told people ironically, was a base emotion; so he directed it after Mike. Mike had told him about his rescue. His own hadn’t seemed to stick, though he did feel he had the First Step by its preternatural balls.

  The sheet was headed ‘God’: and ran in loosely printed letters as follows.

  ‘I offer Myself to the—

  To Build with Me And Do

  with Me As thou Wilt.

  Relieve me of my Bondage

  of Self that I may Better

  Do Thy Will.

  Take Away My Difficulties

  that Victory over them may

  Bear Witness [word much rewritten] to those I

  would help of thy Love,

  Thy Power And thy way

  of Life.

  May I Do My Will

  Always.’

  The University Professor was amused by the tyrannical slip of the executive’s pen though the man was moved. Mike was ahead of him all right; you were not responsible for your unconscious. He even tried to construe the clumsy lettering of ‘My’ into ‘Thy’ but it wouldn’t wash. Severance was expert in various handwritings, particularly Seventeenth Century, and the ‘M’ was irreconcilable with any of the four ‘th’s’ just above it. The point was the sincerity of the assignation, Mike confirming his give-up. In fact, this was a sort of Fifth Step—‘to God, to ourselves, and to another human being.’ He was the other human being. Touched.

  Mike’s rescue had been much like his last Spring. Both had been trying to run their ordinary lives instead of giving their whole attention and force and desire to a treatment Programme. Mike’s situation was tricky: he owned his business but he had with supreme unwiseness taken in one employee and one man from outside as partners, and during the month he had been in hospital one was lying down on the job and the other was trying to cut Mike’s throat with both their customers and the competition. They were also fighting cat-and-dog with each other. Mike could fire the slacker (though he hated the prospect, they were Army buddies) but he needed—at present—the traitor. He walked on eggs, twice or even more often a week when they came in the evening to confer in the downstairs lounge. Now nobody was forbidden to go down there but patients were supposed to stay on the Ward. It was by the Grace of God, then—Severance was with him there—that just as he was about to explode at both of them one evening and throw the firm into chaos, Rita walked in and said harshly, ‘What are you doing here?’ to Mike. His rage collapsed as a balloon plops. ‘What am I doing here?’ he asked himself. ‘Those bastards might cost me my life, the hell with Allied Products’—he seized Rita’s rather formidable hand briefly (‘Thanks!’) and went off upstairs without a word. The partners thought he was crazy, but what could they do worse than they were doing, and from that moment three days before he had dated his beginning of recovery. God bless him.

  Bless me too, You. Granted I don’t deserve it or anything. Severance felt more discouraged than ever, and he did a thing rare for him: he swung into play, on his behalf against the horrors of worthlessness, not his fancy, visible accomplishments and despised honours, but the real stuff, definitive (if anything ever deserved that term—three observers had recently independently concurred on speeds greater than light, so much—perhaps—for that cornerstone) but unannounced. Leaving aside this that and the other, what was it? Limit to three. In what order:

  I. Alkaline phosphatase higher levels before ovulation. A saliva test had proved easy, and three of those he developed twelve years ago showed correlation with body temperature. Begin with the advanced nations, if the silly sex would do it. Church behind you, for once. Hard to see who wouldn’t be.

  II. Sacrifice as the key to the relation between Technology and primate Survival. A new American Dream (the old one, Getting On and Doing Good, having turned into The American Nightmare as a friend of his had put it twenty-odd years ago, catchphrase now): Giving Up and being. Leave the ozone in the stratosphere alone, for instance. Spiritual problem as well as biochemical and politico-economic.

  III. The Big C was (most likely) a virus. Fantastic simplification, and not even literally true—problems of redefinition—but the only avenue in (to date), and he wondered to God why nobody else had stumbled on it during the last eighteen years. Staring them in the face—admittedly, only after I) consummate invitation, 2) recognizing the tool, 3) making one initial connexion, and 4) working their asses off as he had in the winter of ’52–3, from a bloody spectrum of verification and exclusion.

  The three had a common teleology, he suddenly saw: life—or more life anyway. Similar origins too. Severance was a believer in serendipity, like every creative scientist artist and philosopher he knew, but he also believed in the power of frontal attack—not putting up with nescience. The seminal discoveries (recognitions, he preferred to call them) emerged from that cooperation. Well. Similar destinations? No. The first was frontpage country-wide, but only III was Nobel likelihood—for which in fact he sometimes now got mentioned anyway, with almost nothing showing. Who cared? Small wonder that for all his vaunted professionalism his heroes were always the strong silent men (women too—the unpretentious precision of old Mrs Mullins) with everything up their sleeve. Give rare but burn it in. Dr Cushing’s father never spoke to his family for weeks, abstracted, hard-pressed, eminent, came into the house one day and told his wife he’d given all his money to and brought home with him a woman who had lost both arms and both legs, a terrible case, out in the carriage right now—bursting with admiration love and sympathy she ran out into the street and found propped up in it a bronze replica of the Venus of Milo. Happy days. In bed at last he drifted off and somewhere later he was shaking hands, though not of course from any position of equality, with—was it Mary-Jane? yes—‘Stronger than a man’s, simpler than a child’s, her nature was unique.’

  After the rousing lecture next morning on Human Toxicology (‘Among the anatomic changes that have been observed are chronic meningitis with thickening, serious effusions into the ventricles, softening of the brain, and tendencies to hemorrhage and apoplexy … . The mental changes are gradual and progressive, the intellect is obtunded, the judgment overthrown, the moral sense blunted, and mendacity appears in its most bizarre forms, delusions may develop … combination of peripheral sensory polyneuritis with a peculiar tendency to confabulation … . alcoholic pseudo-paresis, which may be distinguished from the syphilitic paresis by the tendency to recovery if drinking can be controlled’—don’t you believe it) Severance indulged, before Group, in a retrospect.

  ‘3rd Wed. a.m.,’ he wrote in the bitter recollection that very very shortly his case would be up for review, and if no progress, out. What in God’s name would he do? ‘First week, increasing selfconfidence, unjustified: because no amount of hard and “honest” thinking will keep me sober, even if my brain were not “fogged” (Gus’s word) by withdrawal (haha, I thought I
didn’t have any) and delusion: it seems to me now that what may do that is the simple ability to recognize my emotions as they occur (I absolutely did not hear Jerry’s concern for me until Mike asked me, though) and then the -’ what word? he left a space—‘to handle them appropriately—as for years I’ve handled them inappropriately, namely with alcohol.

  ‘Second week, increasing self-doubt—maybe a small but definite improvement, because my mental apparatus is in poor shape: didn’t even recognize Gus (surprised when he spoke of this later, and also minimized both to him and myself my drinking over those terrible days), thought yesterday October 2 instead of 27, etc. etc. “Bewildered” (my own word) by what Linc and Rita said to me. Emotions also stupid and confused: did not know how to respond to Vin’s friendly, embracing even, delighted with everything heard about my progress, in the hall—grateful, pleased, but somehow half-blocked and distorted, skeptical, resentful, God damn you. Often catch myself also in irrelevance—have to fight it—clear enough in Stack yesterday, but what about me, part of the illness? Evasion?’

  He sighed. Severance was a great sigher, they came from way down, and he did not altogether trust people who did not sigh a good deal or at least look as if they did. He did not trust himself either, but he started a third paragraph. ‘At least I have been seeking people a little (Mary-Jane, Luriel, Jeree—not much, and all women!) and welcoming them (Harry, Gene, Charley, Mike—two greatly helped me). Luriel conned me, with a phantom “compulsive eating”; at least I recognized this later when she was trying to con Cathy.’

  Prognosis? He was glad to hear the bell for Group. At least the review, the uneasy review, had spared him his usual state of mind as ten o’clock approached, which he put as: cyclonic apprehension. The sooner he got confronted, the better—ghastly ghastly, but better. He couldn’t tell where he stood.